Comment by cjs_ac

> I don't understand your agressiveness towards me, this is a conversation, we can talk and disagree without insulting.

I agree wholeheartedly, and if I really wanted to insult you, I wouldn't bother replying to you at all. You're clearly putting some thought into this, and I respect that, but I think your take is really bad.

I work in the gambling industry. Each weekday, I start my laptop with the knowledge that thousands of people will be hurt by the work I do. Not just the people who play the games, but their families, their children, and, in some cases, their employers who are embezzled from. But my employer treats me better than any other employer I've had, and not just in terms of money (even though I'm not well paid as far as software engineers go). My first career was as a schoolteacher - the poster child of the ethical career - and my fellow teachers treated me like dog shit, in numerous schools: people will do awful things to each other when they believe they're acting for 'the greater good'.

I don't think we can argue that the software engineers at Google are acting unethically because we don't know what choices they have, and we don't know what obligations they have outside their work. I'm not sure that we can argue that 'software freedom' is beneficial to everyone outside a small elite of power users. As much as we can argue that what Google has decided is bad for us as individuals, I don't think we have enough information to morally condemn the people who made and implemented that decision.